Free Wintering by Peter Geye Page A

put his hands at his sides. The fawn sniffed its mother, licked her ear, then turned and ran up the craggy shoreline. Gus and Harry watched it go.
    He might still have thought he was dreaming if, a minute later, he hadn’t crossed the beach, looked down, and seen the dead doe. He stood beside his father, who had his hat in his hand as if he were paying respects.
    “What the hell?” Gus said.
    Harry still had the Remington slung over his shoulder. He removed it and checked the safety and laid it on a rock. “I’m sitting there drinking a cup of coffee while you were napping. The wind was back up. Fierce again.” He whirled his hands above his head as though this needed to be acted out. “I’d already put the gun away. So I get up to take a piss and have a look around. I’m walking up the shore”—he pointed across the lake at the huge boulder—“and looking up at the ridge, where the trees are down, and, no kidding, I see this doe and her fawn coming along the edge. I mean the
very
edge. A gust comes down and, I shit you not, the doe’s blown right off the cliff. Or she slips. Anyway, she lands here.” He gestured at her.
    “Bullshit,” Gus said.
    “I’m not making this up. Look at her legs. Look at her goddamned neck.”
    “Then why’d you shoot her?”
    “Because she wasn’t dead!”
    Gus stared up at the cliff. “She fell from there and didn’t die?”
    Harry scratched his head and put his hat back on. “That’s thirty or forty feet if it’s ten, eh? Just fell off. Two minutes later, that fawn comes walking up the rocks, bawling its fool head off. You heard it.”
    “I think it woke me.”
    Harry waved a hand above his head. “She just fell off. She landed here. She was still alive.”
    “How?”
    “I have no idea. None in the world. When I saw her twitching I went for the gun. Got it out of the case and walked over to that rock. That’s when I saw the fawn.” He reached under his hat and scratched again. “How in the
hell
?”
    They both stood over the deer for a spell until Harry said, “I had to shoot her.” He knelt and grabbed one of its hind legs. “It must be broken in a hundred spots.” He took the other hind leg in his hand. “They’re all broken in a hundred spots.” He stood back up and looked at Gus. “I guess we gut her.”
    “I can do it,” Gus said.
    “No. It was my shot.”
    Gus took the knife from his belt and handed it to his father, who unsheathed it and knelt and rolled the doe onto her back. Before he cut into her he glanced up. “I guess the snow’s gonna beat us now, eh, bud?”

T HEY SPENT two or three days at their camp on the narrows, waiting for the wind to blow through and jerking the venison. By the time they portaged up those falls, their larder was heavier than when they’d left home.
    Gus had suggested when they broke camp earlier that morning that they wait for the fog to lift, but Harry insisted the sun would burn it off. It hadn’t. Half a day later they were paddling slowly, still staring into the whiteness. Every twenty strokes the trees hanging over the water came into view through the fog and Gus felt relieved. It was short in lasting, though, for the fog would swallow them back up almost immediately.
    Harry sang the whole time. One of those chansons that had become anthem.
“Petit rocher de la haute montagne, / Je viens ici finir cette champagne. / Ah! doux échos, entendez mes soupirs, / En languissant je vais bientôt mourir….”
Gus hummed along even as he wondered what the hell the words meant.
    They paddled for another hour before Harry stopped singing, rested his paddle, and stretched his back. “Half a goddamn day,” he said. “We’ve been four hours on this lake and it just won’t quit.”
    “Could be Biwanago,” Gus said, though he had no hope that it was.
    Harry studied the fog in each direction. “And this weather. Christ almighty.”
    Gus took his compass from the hip pocket of his pants. Before he even took a